I work at a farm that produces live feed, mostly for pet stores and zoos. I've been working there full-time for a year-ish, amd I have experience with the production of Tenebrio spp. (mealworm beetles), Galleria spp. (waxworm moths), and Acheta spp. (house crickets). This includes every stage of the life cycle: egg + larva + pupa + adult for the "worms", and egg + nymph + adult for the crickets. The "worms" are sold as larvae for optimum nutritional value and trophic return-on-input, whereas the crickets are sold as adults. My job is one of the "dirty jobs" at the farm. Well, everyone's job there is dirty, but I'm one of the ones scooping feed, breathing clouds of bug shit, handling the product and sometimes having it crawl all over us, being swarmed by moths and beetles and flies, and dodging cockroaches. It's not as terrible as it might sound but it's definitely not clean.
This is a throwaway account that I'll be checking as much as I can today and tomorrow and maybe Monday too. I do not do push notifications or phone notifications and I'm not extremely online enough to respond to everything within 5 minutes, but I'll be logged on at least once an hour for this today. I will respond to every single question if I can, it just might take awhile. If you know or have an inkling of what my main is, shh, plz dun dox. After this AMA is complete I may abandon this account, I only made it for this (plus the bit).
To clear a few things up, YES, I have eaten the product, and YES, I do have a deep hatred for the careerist, corporate-ladder-climbing administrative class. Any other resemblences to a similar username are coincidental.
-WwF
Insofar as a bug's preferences can be understood, are the bugs having a good time? Relative to living in the wild? Is there anything that could be done to improve the bugs' living conditions? Improve bug conditions while still being a viable food source?
The bugs all have an r/k value that means that, like most else toward the bottom of the food chain, most of them in the wild are going to die before reaching adulthood, or even full size as larvae.
All of our crickets live pretty full lives. For the mealworms and wax worms, the ones we keep to breed have absolutely bangin' lives: barely any predation or other threats, a nicely regulated environment, very good nutrition, and when they reach maturity they basically get to fuck and lay eggs all day until their bodies give out. The ones that get "harvested" get to reach full larval size in a low-stress environment. Idk what a bug wants but I can tell when nothing is going wrong.
So briefly, bugs' conditions are far better than in the wild, almost as good as they could possibly be, as long as my coworkers and bosses don't make mistakes....
Great! Thanks for answering.
It sounds like the mealworms and wax worms are having a better time than the crickets. Because I'm a giant baby, I'm much more enthusiastic about eating cricket meat than meal worms, so I'm curious about their situation. Is there something about cricket agriculture that should be improved?
(In case it's not clear, all these questions are more about "what if we all eat bug meat" than about your specific workplace.)
I am not concerned about farmed insect welfare the way I am concerned about farmed vertebrate welfare. For one thing, it's dubious as to whether insects have any feelings beyond "something is appealing" and "something is going wrong". For another, mostly due to their size, it's a lot easier to provide an insect with everything it needs to live well. Some larvae are well-accustomed to squirming all over each other while they eat plant matter and fatten up for metamorphosis. Keeping birds and mammals in enclosures 1.5 body lengths long, though, or in barns where they barely have enough room to stand, is fiendish.
Years ago I had my first taste of roasted spiced crickets and cricket cookies. We'd have to become an order of magnitude more efficient to be able to make them a major part of people's diets, though. But I'm not saying it's impossible.
Yeah, I also don't really value insect lives as highly as vertebrates' lives. But I know there are people who think it's abhorrent to draw that distinction. So, for their sake, I think your second point - that it's also just comparatively easy to care for bugs - matters quite a bit.
If we don't have a value system where we appraise things by their degree of consciousness, then the logical conclusion is that nothing should be allowed to predate anything else, and the only beings allowed to exist are autotrophs. And that probably means an end to all cognition unless we turn ourselves into sentient robots.
I could go on, but it would involve turning over some very uncomfortable big-picture thoughts... has this been BMF enough for you?
I mean, we can acknowledge a broken world and still try to live as best we can. I'm vegan because I know that I'll kill fewer total lives (including plants) as a vegan than a carnist.
That said, I like your argument that the bugs lead better lives on a farm than in the wild, it's an interesting thought to play with
because I know that I’ll kill fewer total lives (including plants)
This is getting uncomfortably close to the longtermist discourse.
Bringing the wolves back to Yellowstone... good or bad?
Our crickets probably have the "better" lives actually. They don't all get to make-a da baybee bugg, but they do get to reach adulthood before being either nommed by a herp or forgotten on a shelf or in a fridge, which is more than 98% of our meal and wax worms can say. An adult female darkling beetle (mealworm) can lay several hundred eggs. So we don't need to route that much of our operation to replenishing our in-house populations.
My friend in college had a bunch of fancy mantis/walking sticks in his closet that he said he sold to college labs for $20 a piece.
Cool job!
I knew a guy who sold exotics too, grew them right in his trailer. He gave up on it after a couple years but made a bit of cash doing it.
The stuff we sell is like 3-25 cents a worm, which if you consider the price by weight is still quite expensive.
Because I don't give names to my bugs. I don't check up on them individually, I monitor their progress and health in bulk, 5000+ at a time.
Idk. We just call most of our rooms "grow rooms". It's what I'm used to saying.
I'm really good with names, they will totally be the perfect name for every individual big. You will think to yourself 'why didn't I think of this name, they are clearly an (insert name like Jennifer here).'
*Dave Anthony voice*
"Now don't get too attached to this one, Gareth."
Here is a picture of one of each bug. Pray tell -- what would they be named?
(p.s. I'm no bug doctor so the pictures might not even be the right bugs)
Oo you can name the first one Chester! After one of my most beloved children's book characters, who is also a cricket.
The cricket is named Shirley, the beetle is named Douglas and would prefer you not call him Doug, the moth larva is named Janice
What's been the highest and lowest point as a bug farmer? What's something you wish people knew about your profession?
Lowest point- Pulling out a tray and finding out that it's full of cockroaches. Or having a week where all I do is scraping bugs off wood and plastic and cardboard, getting their guts all over me.
Highest point- So there are several different species that kinda end up living alongside mealworms. One day I found a simple, low-energy, and highly effective way to separate them out. A lot of coworkers spend an hour a day just trying to vacuum up the "pests", so this made me feel like a pro.
Also, I've gotten to the point where I understand how to run the operation as well as the boss does, and seeing our production numbers rise and fall and knowing what's behind it is very gratifying. It's not super hard to know these things but it kinda thrills me to see the bosses making mistakes or failing to make improvements that I could easily remediate.
About bug farming? It's not too hard. You can do it pretty much anywhere. If you have middlings from any grain available in bulk you can probably do it. The hardest parts are containment, along with the energy cost of keeping it 28-30°C all the time. Unless you make some sort of breakthrough in efficiency, though, it's mostly just going to be food for captive reptiles/amphibians/birds.
To add to what's worth knowing, the profit margins are pretty fantastic. The company I work for has a lot of waste and a lot of things they haven't figured out, but if my estimations are right, they are still absolutely making bank. Not a lot of the revenue trickles down to the regular workers at the bottom though. If it was a worker cooperative, all of the workers would be quite financially well-off, by any state's standards.
Yes! In fact, I first had the idea several months before I even found out about my current workplace.
The biggest issue would be startup capital. You'd need to put up a bunch of glorified sheds, you'd need the HVAC systems to keep it like a hot and humid summer day all the time, you'd need deliveries of feed and all the long-tail expenses of running a business like this. I think you would probably want at least half a mil to get off the ground.
There are several other
cooperativecommunal business ideas that I think are both more essential and easier to get off the ground.Possibly. To an extent, you want to maximize your floor space and minimize the total volume of air, so you want something pretty flat. If you could heat (and perhaps humidify) the warehouse, I see no reason why not. Tbh we have a couple warehouses on site and our grow rooms are like warehouses with more insulation.
Mushroom farming was one of the other things I had on my list! I'll PM you.
A multistory warehouse should be more efficient to heat than a single story building with the same square footage and ceiling height. They're not terribly common, but worth knowing in case you happen to find one.
But then you need to carry things up and down stairs. Or have a really expensive elevator. The best solution is to find a way to only switch stuff from floor to floor in bags, and have every floor be a subunit.
how would you like it if bugs grew you as an efficient and protein rich food source?
Bugs are not a particularly efficient protein source, and neither am I.
When I die I wouldn't care if bugs ate me. But I have the (cursed?) ability to dread my own death or other forms of my undoing. I can distinguish myself aesthetically and behaviorally from every other member of my species. I can do this because I have a CNS with millions of thousands of neurons, not just a few thousand.
Who's to say that a carrot or a nice allium doesn't want to die? You have to draw the line somewhere, and I draw the line at having a brain that is developed enough to recognize specific individuals, solve problems, conceptualize itself and others.
For a good-faith discussion on the subject, see @Owl's comment and the exchange there.
Mealworms taste true to their name: kinda bready, but not as good as bread. Texture is a bit of an issue. Superworms taste more bitter and sooty, like a mix between oysters and an odd kind of smoke seasoning. I haven't eaten any wax worms yet, sooner or later a coworker will dare me to eat one and I'll take them up on it.
The smell of these 2 bugs is usually somewhat indicative of what they taste like.
They shouldn't, at least not necessarily.
Mealworm frass has a faint odor, but still isn't very noticeable. "Spent" feed for wax worms smells a little unpleasant. Mature adults give off mating pheromones that have a strong smell when you have many thousands of them in a tub; some people hate this burnt-pungent smell but most are just fine with it. It's the cockroaches that smell the worst.
When the larvae die, especially due to any reason other than desiccation, and they rot, that is what really causes them to smell bad.
Oh and soldier fly larvae stink with ammonia a tiny little bit most of the time, and a whole lot right after being fed.
These were adult crickets I think being airmailed so probably many dead inside.
This is very interesting. What are the particulars of your role? How did you get into the job, how long have you been there, and how long do you plan to stay? Also, what is the physical facility like?
What are the particulars of your role?
Putting new broods of mealworms/waxworms/crickets in feed containers, separating larger worms from smaller worms (many insect larvae molt about a dozen times before pupating), moving the more mature insects to different rooms ("bug barns"), catching the adults at the right time to transfer them to different containers for breeding, topping off feed and/or water supply, cleaning down the area. Most of what I've been doing involves screening/filtering the bugs for pupae and adults. We work 8 hours a day but it's possible for a larva to reach adult stage in 3 days, and if the adults are mating before they're in the egg-laying bins, their eggs end up wasted (or develop early and fly around where they're not wanted).
How did you get into the job
Knew a guy who already worked there.
how long do you plan to stay?
If they continue to pay me well enough, allow me to take time off, let me to do a variety of tasks, and value my contributions to their productivity, maybe a year or two, maybe even a bit longer. If they force me to just do tedious grunt work, then only as long as it takes for me to have a shot at labor organizing.
Also, what is the physical facility like?
If the American building paradigm is cheap and flimsy, this facility is even flimsier. A lot of it is pretty low-tech actually. Everything is grown indoors, so there are fluorescent lights and HVAC systems for the grow rooms. Some of them even have humidifiers. But most of what I work around is plastic tubs that go on wooden racks, plus plastic bags and cardboard. Some feed we order by the 40lb bag, other feed we order by the truckload. Many of the buildings are fairly new but already look like they're aging. We're often pushing (sometimes forklifting) racks and supplies around from building to building, like worker ants. Spiders and cockroaches are everywhere.
Crickets are something that's not too hard. Lots of versatility and they don't actually jump unless spooked. They're probably the highest profit-margin product we have so I suspect you might be able to downscale it. The caveat is that they require hot temperatures, warmer than anyone is comfortable with indoors.
Mealworms are also a good bet, they don't taste horrible, they're pretty hardy, and make fairly good use of resources. You'll need a cheap source of agricultural (grain) byproducts, though, and don't expect to make bugs your main protein source with a home growing operation.
Soldier flies are for supplementing animal diets. I mean, the product is a maggot, I've never heard of anyone who wants to eat maggots. Soldier flies can also be good for composting, or so I've heard. Grown for feed, they require a lot of particulars in the procedure. For instance, they produce ammonia so you can never sanitize your containers and floors with bleach.
You can probably go by your local pet store/pet supply outlet and purchase some regular crickets or mealworms or whatever else, and they should be reproductively viable. If you can keep 'em alive in jars for a generation or two, you can probably scale it up. Just be sure to buy a couple new ones from somewhere periodically if your population is low, to avoid genetic bottlenecking.
You’ll need a cheap source of agricultural (grain) byproducts, though, and don’t expect to make bugs your main protein source with a home growing operation.
What sort of scale do you think one might need for that? With all this supply chain collapse and whatnot I often wonder if a mutual aid organization might work for teaching communities to build up distributed bugs and mushroom growing operations. Does that sound like something viable or best left to my daydreams?
If you have wheat farms around, or other grain farms that might have bran and germ left over, there's gotta be a way you could take it off their hands. If you have a good source of root vegetables, a little bit goes a long way for keeping them hydrated and giving them micronutrients. Idk exactly what all they can eat and thrive on, probably all sorts of stuff.
maybe ask barrack obama for big black cones of wheat (CW: FB link)
Oh, I was more wondering about having enough bugs to make them a main protein source for people. :) Like what size operation do you think that would need?
Well, if I were to make a very rough estimate, I would say that 5,000 full-size mealworms might possibly be enough protein for 1 person for 1 day. So our mealworm operation, at its best, has produced enough to feed 150 people on a daily basis with 12 FTE personnel. Consider, though, that farmers are <1% of the American population today.
We grow bugs to feed reptiles mostly, but my boss has told me about how in China they have intensive operations where they produce mealworms for human consumption.
I think it's less a question of size to begin with, and more a question of whether you can cover every step in the process (that follows the life cycle) and keep your population stable. This alone would require several people, but once you achieved this, the marginal labor requirement to add another couple racks (~250k worms per rack) to the mix would be small. Slowly building your way up, you'd eventually reach a point where all your employees are occupied all day long, and by that point I think you would definitely be able to feed people.
Hmm, interesting. I wanna sit down and do the math right now, but I've gotta get going for a road trip. Definitely stuff to think about, thank you!
@wax_worm_futures (feel free to offer your wisdom)
waves
So, I've got a garbage can that I slowly fill with kitchen compost and garden compost that seems to attract soldier flies. We've got the bin in the shade where the chickens roam so they eat the larvae that do their thing and crawl out of the bin. Some years there has been a pretty sizable colony and I'd imagine that a different setup than we use on the farm would allow you to catch the larva and get them in a freezer.
I think spent grain from distilleries/beer making might be an acceptable food source for the flies when mixed with other food stuffs. I can't remember if we've poured the used yeast into the compost/bug bin though.
Spent grain would probably be a rather viable option. So would used yeast. For some of the wet feed we make in-house, yeast and glucose syrup are ingredients. Wet feed for soldier fly larvae has vinegar mixed in.
In terms of feeding your chickens... you probably could put the effort into getting them more soldier fly larvae, but would it really be worth it? If the chickens can already go over there and peck at whatever grubs, that comes at zero cost to you. I would say that permaculturally, what you have already is quite an elegant emergent setup, and doesn't need too much input or guidance from you besides dumping the compost and letting the chickens roam.
Soldier fly larvae retail for like 20 cents a pop, I'm not even kidding. But to sell them you need a certain level of marketing and consistency of production.
Soldier fly larvae retail for like 20 cents a pop, I’m not even kidding. But to sell them you need a certain level of marketing and consistency of production.
20 cent per..... individual?! That's mad capital. Not per ounce or nuthin?
Actually they are closer to 12 cents wholesale, and 20 cents retail, but still.
I shit you not, they have big margins. I would suspect that the total of the factors that go into their production comes out to maybe 3-4 cents a worm. With just a little bit of capital investment in thhe form of buildings and HVAC, it's possible for 2 full-time employees to produce 1 million soldier fly larvae on a really good week, and maybe 500 thousand on a bad week.
I could get rich! And ditch all you losers and never look back!
(Just kidding, I love my comrades)
Never thought to mix in vinegar, whats the purpose?
In terms of feeding your chickens… you probably could put the effort into getting them more soldier fly larvae, but would it really be worth it? If the chickens can already go over there and peck at whatever grubs, that comes at zero cost to you. I would say that permaculturally, what you have already is quite an elegant emergent setup, and doesn’t need too much input or guidance from you besides dumping the compost and letting the chickens roam.
Soldier fly larvae, as far as my wife has read, are easier to propagate in larger quantity than grubs (at least for our setup/purposes) and they're extremely high in nutritional value. Also, she likes to tinker with things she's read about for fits and shiggles.
Soldier fly larvae retail for like 20 cents a pop, I’m not even kidding. But to sell them you need a certain level of marketing and consistency of production.
Like... each? or by weight?
I went by a local pet store and I saw the product from my company on the shelf. It was like $3 for a cup of 20.
I suspect the vinegar is to make sure their pH doesn't get too imbalanced; they produce a LOT of ammonia. It may also inhibit competitors from being able to eat their feed.
If a Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis situation happened to you how would you deal?
cri
mebbe sneak myself over to some oligarch's home to unleash my final form
I would say that in terms of land use, it is several times, if not tens of times, more economically productive than conventional monocrop agriculture. Our insects are, after all, a value-added product in a way.
Energy is a big expense, not completely sure. I don't have access to the company finances and it's not likely that I soon will; I'll have to do more digging to really find out. I made my estimates on profitability by considering the electric bills for apartments I've lived in and scaling them up to the building space at work. You could build something more insulated but the tradeoff would be costlier construction for cheaper heating. And if you built it out of cob or strawbale or something then it'd be less cost but more labor.
We spray a lot of water in cleaning. The water we use for the crickets to drink is not that much. Washing out our trays/pans/jars takes up several times more water than a large household, but that could be economized too.
I'll combine several questions into one by saying that if you did a little bit of optimization and if everyone knew what they were doing, then with 7-10 FTEs, you could probably have a modest operation in a 10,000-square-foot facility that rivaled the production level of any of the smaller sectors at my work. Maybe one tenth of the total equipment and structures and facilities and personnel that my workplace has, give or take. You'd probably need at least a few hundred thousand to get it up and going. Or maybe I'm off with that estimate- you could grow bugs in a spare room or something and move it to a different facility once it got big and steady enough. But I still don't see the startup cost coming much below $100,000.
EDIT: It would not make sense to farm bugs as the main feed for animals. That would be like Sisyphus rolling a large stone block up the trophic pyramid.
Are you responsible for all this “Havana Syndrome” hullabaloo?? Be honest with us.
I declare that I have no personal involvement or intention in any biological operation that directly resulted in Havana Syndrome.
As for whether the progeny of insects I helped raise might have played a contributing factor in the malaise of employees or contractors of the State and Defense Departments... no comment.
